EV Journal Mailbox size ?

[Dushan_Gomez]

Hi Guys,

I just want to ask you for some clarification regarding how EV v8.0 SP4 works in conjunction with Exchange Server 2007 SP1 in CCR environment.

After the full backup of the Exchange Server is done and the EV Journal Archive task finished, how come the size of my EVJournal mailbox is still larger than 16 GB ? I assume that this mailbox should be few megabytes in total after the EVJournal task and Full Exchange Backup is taken.

Can anyone please calrify this matter in simple terms ?

Thanks in advance

[JesusWept3 · Accepted solution]

It's possible that it's just purely whitespace and that you need to run maintainance/defrag together the size down correctly Also the after back up scenarios would really only apply if you were journaling and opting to remove safety copes after backup as opposed to immediately after archiving which is the majority of journaling users preference Also I'm assuming items aren't going to failed to store folders are they? Any items that go to failed to store will obviously take up space in the journal mbx

[Dushan_Gomez]

Thanks for the reply Jesus,

So in this case to reduce/shrink the whitespace it can only be done through ESEUTIL which means it must bring the mailbox DB offline ?

I might try that since this StorageGroup only contains one MailboxDB and one EVJournal Mailbox only so if it is offline during the working hour it shouldn't be a problem right ?

[Rob_Wilcox1]

Regarding your last comments...

Is your journal mailbox in a mailbox store of it's own?  Or is it in the same mailbox database as regular mailboxes?

What is showing your journal mailbox as >16 Gb?

Once has finished archiving the data out of that mailbox and caught up as it were, the database size on disk won't shrink until an Offline Defrag has taken place.  That's a limitation of Exchange Server.

There are other options, but to go in to them I'd need the answer to the first bits :)

[AndrewB]

dushan, can you clarify if you mean the mailbox is 16gb or is the database 16gb?

[Liam_Finn1]

There is an easier way to do this instead of taking your Journal mailbox offline to defrag the Exchange Database.

On the Exchange server where the journal mailbox resides create another mail store in the same Storage Group this way if you want to shrink the exchange mail store DB you can move your journal and system mailbox to the second mail store. Once that's complete dismount the old mail store delete the files related to that mail store then remount the mail store and restart the exchange services. Then restart the EV serves on the EV server running the journal task

This will in essence wipe out the white space as moving the mailboxes will only move the emails and not move any white space in the DB, all this without having to take the Journal Mailbox offline for a long time as it should take moments to move the mailbox from store to store.

Seeing as you are moving the mailboxes within the same storage groups no reconfig is needed of the Outlook client and no config is needed on EV. 

It will also help with your backups as it shrinks your exchange DB

Once the above is done you can then recreate the second Mail store to use in the future so you have two  at all times in the storage group to give you the ability to perform this whenever you see your exchange DB being so large with so few messages in it

I do this because taking it offline and running defrag will shrink the DB but the messages still build up on the exchange servers so once you bring it back on line again you get a flood of mails that brings you right back to where you were before you did the defrag and that makes the defrag pointless

This process prevents that from happening

[Dushan_Gomez]

Andrew, it is the total partition size 16 GB: 14 GB MB DB size which only contains this EVJournal mailbox only and the rest is transaction log.

[AndrewB]

ok that makes more sense. did you see scanner's post? he describes a good idea.